Made In America - Bill Bryson [15]
Colonial American English positively teems with such constructions: jointworm, glowworm, eggplant, canvasback, copperhead, rattlesnake, bluegrass, backtrack, bobcat, catfish, blue-jay, bullfrog, sapsucker, timberland, underbrush, cookbook, frostbite, hillside (at first sometimes called a sidehill), plus such later additions as tightwad, sidewalk, cheapskate, sharecropper, skyscraper, rubberneck, drugstore, barbershop, hangover, rubdown, blowout and others almost without number. These new terms had the virtues of directness and instant comprehensibility – useful qualities in a land whose populace included increasingly large numbers of non-native speakers – which their British counterparts often lacked. Frostbite is clearly more descriptive than chilblains, sidewalk, than pavement, eggplant than aubergine, doghouse than kennel, bedspread than counterpane, whatever the English might say.
One creature that very much featured in the lives of the earliest colonists was the passenger pigeon. The name comes from an earlier sense of passenger as one that passes by, and passenger pigeons certainly did that in almost inconceivably vast numbers. One early observer estimated a passing flock as being a mile wide and 240 miles long. They literally darkened the sky. At the time of the Mayflower landing there were perhaps nine billion passenger pigeons in North America, more than twice the number of all the birds found on the continent today. With such numbers they were absurdly easy to hunt. One account from 1770 reported that a hunter brought down 125 with a single shot from a blunderbuss. Some people ate them, but most were fed to pigs. Millions more were slaughtered for the sport of it. By 1800 their numbers had been roughly halved and by 1900 they were all but gone. On 1 September 1914 the last one died at Cincinnati Zoo.
The first colonists were not, however, troubled by several other creatures that would one day plague the New World. One was the common house rat. It wouldn’t reach Europe for another century (emigrating there abruptly and in huge numbers from Siberia for reasons that have never been explained) and did not make its first recorded appearance in America until 1775, in Boston. (Such was its adaptability that, by the time of the 1849 gold rush, early arrivals to California found the house rat waiting for them. By the 1960s there were an estimated one hundred million house rats in America.) Many other now common animals, among them the house mouse and the common pigeon, were also yet to make their first trip across the ocean.
For certain species we know with some precision when they arrived, most notoriously with that airborne irritant the starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American landscape all the birds mentioned in the writings of Shakespeare. Most of the species he introduced failed to prosper, but the forty pairs of starlings he released in New York’s Central Park in the spring of 1890, augmented by twenty more pairs the following spring, so thrived that within less than a century they had become the most abundant bird species in America, and one of its greatest